Phei eased them apart with the unhurriedly like he was rearranging an altar for the next rite—and the darker hunger that had been banking in his blood since the Dragon surfaced flared to life, quiet and absolute, a furnace that had never actually gone out.
He laid Maddie flat on her back across the wide marble ledge at the pool's edge. Her smaller body stretched out beneath him—flushed, trembling, still twitching from the aftershocks of what he'd already done to her—and for one unguarded second she looked up at him with an expression that had nothing to do with chaos and everything to do with surrender.
Her eyes were blown wide and she heaved softly; her muscles in her stomach jumped with every breath.
She looked, like a woman who had just realized the inferno she'd been begging for was about to turn its full attention on her specifically.
Good.
